This invention relates to the creation of dynamically customized user-specific advertisements for users, such as users of a social networking system.
In a traditional advertising model, advertising companies that advertise to consumers maintain a large inventory of fixed advertisements intended for a variety of demographics. For this reason, advertising companies have attempted to streamline and modernize the process of creating advertisements so that, ultimately, more advertising can be sold. With the advent of online advertising, advertisers have gained more information about the users to whom they are advertising, such as by having the ability to track a computer user's online activities using cookies. This can allow advertisers to display advertisements to specific users or groups of users tailored to the users' online habits, such as by populating specific fields in an online advertisement when the advertisement is served. For example, an online advertisement may display a viewer's name, or an item the viewer once observed on the advertiser's website. Because this type of advertisement is somewhat personalized, it may be more likely to appeal to a viewer. However, the advertisement would be even more likely to attract the viewer's attention if it could provide additional helpful information targeted to a particular viewer.
Also, advertisers have increasingly relied on social networking systems to create advertisements within the social networking system, because social networking systems have a rich database of user profile information that can be used for ad targeting. However, this type of advertising is still limited to only information that a user provides to the social networking system, so it still provides a somewhat limited ability to personalize ads to users.
Additionally, providing personalized data about users in an advertisement can raise security and privacy issues. Users are already weary of cookie-based online tracking by advertisers, and want to ensure their privacy is maintained within social networking systems. Advertisers have access to the online habits of users, and social networking systems receive large amounts of personal information about their users, such as age, gender, and physical location, as well as family pictures, videos, and email addresses. However, both parties (and their users) may prefer that this information not be shared with the other party and users may prefer that their information be kept as private as possible. Furthermore, advertisers may wish to keep certain information about their ad campaigns confidential, which is difficult to do when this information must be disclosed to the social networking system that will be serving the ads. Methods are desirable that enable more personalized advertisements to be displayed while maintaining privacy or confidentiality of all parties involved in the serving of the ads.